David Eyman begins this chapter by acknowledging that the digitized version of Aristotle’s faithful old rhetorical triangle mirrors a system of interconnectivity rather than a static, threefold framework.  He asserts that methods of digital rhetoric must “take into account the complications of the affordances of digital practices, including circulation, interaction, and the engagement of multiple symbol systems within rhetorical objects.”  The relationship among rhetor, audience, digital text or discourse, and contexts reveals a dynamic circulation which can be theorized as an activity.  This follows the current trend in circulation studies, which according Laurie Gries is “an interdisciplinary approach to studying discourse in motion” where “…scholars investigate not only how discourse is produced and distributed, but also how once delivered, it circulates, transforms, and affects change through its material encounters” (333). Although Gries’s concern is methodological — that is, she develops a specific method, called iconographic tracking–-she ultimately argues that rhetoric is “a distributed process whose beginning and end cannot be easily identified. Like a dynamic network of energy, rhetoric materializes, circulates, transforms, and sparks new material consequences, which, in turn, circulate, transform, and stimulate an entirely new divergent set of consequences” (346). Eyman does acknowledge the dynamic flux of discourse digitized; however, he recognizes that  traditional rhetorical methods act as a foundational framework within digital contexts: thus, in this chapter, he suggests ways to adapt traditional rhetorical methods into a digital milieu.

Eyman begins by delineating the differences between the New Critical method of “close reading” with Franco Moretti’s contemporary supposition of “distant reading.”  Close reading—methods of analyzing the formal qualities of a text—has traditionally been associated with print text; yet, Eyman claims that it nearly always acts as a fundamental method within digital contexts. As an aside too, digital contexts have expanded our abilities to close-read; check out Amanda Visconti’s dissertation on Ulysses.

However, Eyman also claims that instead of reading the “text-as object” as most New Critics might, reading the formal qualities of a digital text must “include those [qualities] specific to different media.”

Eyman also describes the inverse of close reading—Franco Moretti’s concept of “distant reading.”Eyman explains that “distant reading takes a long view, examining the text as one among many and considering a much larger corpus whose contexts and relationships give rise to different forms of meaning.”  Seeing reading, according to Franco Moretti, as “a condition of knowledge” allows scholars to form a methodology that creates connections between computational analytics and data visualizations.

It also seems that Kurt Vonnegut did, however, have his own view of “distant reading” before Moretti: check it out!

Also, one of Moretti’s visualizations shows the emergence of the market for novels in Britain, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Nigeria between about 1700 and 2000 (see graph). The wild spikes in popularity look like fish hooks, even as each country’s bibliophilia caught on at different times. So computation plus visualization allow us to get a more complete view of cultural trends than intensive reading of a few works lumped into a canon.  Despite criticism of Moretti’s work, author Jonathan Franzen argues that seeing literature as a cultural artifact reveals its agential qualities:  “To use new technology to look at literature as a whole, which has never really been done before, rather than focusing on complex and singular works, is a good direction for cultural criticism to move in. Paradoxically, it may even liberate canonical works to be read more in the spirit in which they were written.”  I think it’s an interesting conversation also to make us think about the evolution of reading and rhetoric in the digital age: How do we read images? What counts as “text”?

The evolving field of digital composition engages multiple modes and media; thereby digital composition and rhetorics emerge as collaborative activities that provide broad opportunities for publication and circulation.  Eyman recognizes, then, that from professional writing and research, digital rhetoric follows two research traditions: genre studies and usability.

Genre studies privilege “a multilayered approach of both micro- and macro-level interactions,” while usability takes both system and user into account and therefore “provides a methodology for studying both writing practices and writing pedagogies.”  By engaging these methods, Eyman contends that theorizing new digital methods will account for modes of professional composition and rhetoric as well as the multimodal, multimedia networks of the digital world. Thus, Eyman notes an increasing amount of research that suggests, obviously, that the very definition of writing and composition have changed in the digital age.

In addition, Eyman suggests that Heidi McKee and Danielle DeVoss’s , Digital Writing Research:Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues is a prominent collection because it reveals the broadening scope of writing activities, and it also considers a cyborgian and networked view of human communications and also includes theories of triangulation (texts, contexts, and users) and ecological metaphors of digital texts and contexts.

The chapter concludes by explaining a variety of interdisciplinary methods that may be appropriate for assembling digital rhetoric methods. I have listed them below.

1.) C.O.D.E and Network Administration Tools: the study of the networks of digital rhetoric both material and immaterial. C.O.D.E. stands for “Comprehensive Online Document Evaluation,” and unfolds both the geographies and owners of networked systems.

2.) Studying Web Usage via Server Log Analysis: this method analyzes the log files of users; server log analysis reveals quantitative data that shows the change in a site’s traffic data. This shows the relationship between a digital text and its audience.

3.) Social Network Analysis: this is a research approach that focuses on patterns of relationships among people, and it studies relationships in context with other relationships in a network.

4.) Hypertext Network Analysis:  HNA is a form of social network analysis that only looks at nodes and ties of digital texts as instantiated in websites and web links. Basically, it analyzes hyperlinks.

5.) Bibliometrics and Cybermetrics: these methods trace the use and value of texts through citation analysis.

6.) Content Analysis: this method is similar to social network analysis, except it focuses on the relationships within an individual text rather than between texts.

7.) Data Visualization: a method used to structure data in ways that visually reveal patterns.

Despite the fact that Eyman is hopeful that many of these methods can be assimilated for digital rhetoric methods, he does cite a few complicating factors. First, he identifies accessibility as an issue: “Accessibility can be impeded by intellectual property gatekeeping (restricted access to networks and texts that circulate in  and through those restricted systems, as well as cost-prohibited fees on certain content), but it is also an issue when considering the format of the rhetorical objects themselves.” Second, Eyman also claims that the ephemeral nature of digital texts makes tracking and tracing difficult.

Questions:

1.) How do some of Nakamura’s claims complicate the theorization of digital rhetoric methodologies?  What other elements should we consider here?

2.) The lack of traceable exigence within digital rhetoric seems to be a problematic factor. The inability to trace origins fosters a synthesis of roles within immediate rhetorical situations. While classical or modernist views of rhetorical situations rely on the stability of such categories as “rhetor,” “audience,” and “message,” postmodernist and immediate views of rhetorical situations assume these divisions are arbitrary and in constant flux.

How can our methodologies account for this? How does the lack of origin change the ways in which we study rhetoric? Explain.

3.)  How might a consideration of these methods help us to do the work of defining Digital Rhetoric as an emerging field?

4.) Eyman’s move towards interdisciplinary methods suggests collaborative, cross-disciplinary research.  Yet, how do these methods complicate global versus local forms of knowledge? Can you think of positive and negative consequences of this?  How does this affect the field of the humanities in general?

5.) Do you have any specific concerns regarding any of the methods outlined by Eyman?

Works Cited

Gries, Laurie E. “Iconographic Tracking: A Digital Research Method for Visual Rhetoric and Circulation Studies.” Computers and Composition 30.4 (2013): 332–348. ScienceDirect. Web. 15 Nov. 2013.

“The Nine Souls of Wilde Cunningham” presents an optimistic portrayal of the ways in which the dialectic between the virtual world and the real world redistribute flows of information that socially construct identity.  The startling avatar of Wilde, “with their bulky body and their orange skin, and red hair jutting in every direction from their balding head,” virtually creates an embodiment of multiple identities and multiple viewpoints. Wilde also expresses a unique voice: they give a group of physically disabled people—otherwise marginalized within society—a mode of expression that depends on the erasure of the physicality of the real body. The Second Life presence of the group appropriates the ways in which technology initiates opportunities of communication for people with disabilities. In addition, by creating an avatar, the group’s expression supports some of the theoretical claims of N. Katharine Hayles in that the identity of Wilde is created through the pattern/randomness of the codes of text that the group expresses, instead of the physical presence of their bodies; the amalgamation of codes allows them to form social and physical interactions through a new representation of physical consciousness.

The example of Wilde, too, raises awareness regarding forms of inclusion and access for people with disabilities. Wilde’s philosophic message “so be kind to others in spite of their flaws. Every soul has its disabilities” emerges as a way to reconstruct disability within a dimension which, perhaps, permeates outward and fosters awareness in order to cultivate social interactions within real life.  Moreover, virtual worlds and new media provide access to life experiences otherwise unavailable to people with physical disabilities. According to Kel Smith,  “For people with disabilities that prevent them from engaging in real life physical activities, virtual worlds present a unique opportunity for users to replicate the experience at an immersive level” (4). This supports the ideological immersion that virtual reality creates for its users; in fact, Smith also notes that aside from providing social therapies, “virtual reality applications have been used to augment rehabilitation therapy for patients struggling with the loss of a limb. Research demonstrates that the brain’s perception to pain can be reduced when it is “tricked” into operating a replicative appendage” (4).   Here, Smith claims that virtual reality espouses both physical and mental rehabilitation.

The advantages of utilizing new media among persons with disabilities also connects to the ways in which marginal voices find agency in cyberspace.  In her study, “Marginal Voices in Cyberspace,” Amanda Mitra claims that through a heteroglossic and hyperconnected digital voice, marginalized persons create a metaphor of voice that “has the potential of producing a call that the dominant has a moral obligation to acknowledge.”  Thus, Mitra recognizes the ways in which the creation of voice in cyberspace, a dialogic metaphor produced through technology, problematizes  the relationship between the marginal and the dominant in real life by recognizing a crisis of acknowledgement.  Hence, the refraction of voice that occurs through a cyber-heteroglossic voice recognizes a struggle of apprehension that supports Mikhail Bahktin’s assertion that  “In the act of understanding, a struggle occurs that results in mutual change and enrichment.”

Mitra, Amanda. “Marginal Voices in Cyberspace.” New Media and Society 2002 (March): 29-49. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 February 2016.

Smith, Kel. “The Use of Virtual Worlds Among People with Disabilities.” http://tcf.pages.tcnj.edu/files/2013/12/kelSmith_virtual_worlds_disabilities_032409.pdf

In How We Became Posthuman (1999), N. Katherine Hayles interrogates the shifting representations of the body in societies enmeshed within information networks: “Different technologies of text production suggest different models of signification; changes in signification are linked with shifts in consumption; shifting patterns of consumption initiate new experiences of embodiment; and embodied experience interacts with codes of representation to generate new kinds of textual worlds” (28).  The “body-in-flux,” or what Arthur Kroker describes as the notion of “body drift” that Hayles correlates with the dialectic between the pattern and randomness of flows of information renders a dematerialization of representations of both textual and human embodiment. Identifying a shift between signifier and signified, Hayles theorizes the ways in which a “flickering signifier” “brings together language with a psychodynamics based on the symbolic moment when the human confronts the posthuman” (33).  Thus, Hayles delineates the ways in which flickering signifiers are “characterized by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions” that occur within material-informational exchanges (30).  Hayles recognizes the ways in which these “flows” or “interchanges”  that occur through various types of technology depend on our abilities to understand the shift from “presence/absence” to “pattern/randomness,” not as a way of disregarding the material world, but as a way of understanding shifts of visibility.  She argues that “The pattern/randomness dialectic does not erase the material world; information in fact derives its efficacy from the material infrastructures it appears to obscure” (28). Thus, this illusion of erasure should be a subject of inquiry, not a presupposition that inquiry takes for granted.

In her discussion of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979), Hayles underscores the novel’s metafictive impulse: “The text operates as if it knows it has a physical body and fears that its body is in jeopardy from a host of threats, from defective printing technologies and editors experiencing middle-age brain fade to nefarious political plots. Most of all, perhaps, the text fears losing its body of information” (41). Like Hayles suggests, Calvino’s text reinforces its own version of Jorges Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel,” and Calvino’s development of the interrelationship between reader, writer, and text depicts the dissolution of the modern subject that must constantly be reborn through the reading process.

In addition, Calvino juxtaposes the disorder of human relationships with the disorder of his narrative text.  However, he recognizes that within this disorder, there can be a recognized order: through the symbol of the labyrinth, Calvino metaphorically gives modern man a way to maneuver through a postindustrial, technological world.  He recognizes that the only way for modern man to survive is to move from one labyrinth to the next, the same way that the novel moves from one incipit to the next.  According to Calvino’s essay, “La sfida al labirinto” (Challenge to the Labyrinth), he argues, “What literature ought to do is to define a stance for the best way out, even if this way out will entail going from one labyrinth to another.  It is the challenge of the labyrinth that we want to save, it is a literature of challenge to the labyrinth that we want to enucleate and distinguish from the literature of surrender to the labyrinth” (qtd. in Weiss 71).  Calvino’s labyrinthine incipits are related, yet they evoke difference.  This difference, or as Jacques Derrida would say, différance, can also be represented through language.  Because deconstruction displaces notions of presence and absence through the randomness and patterns of a network of discourse that is only always a deferral, Calvino’s labyrinth provides no clear beginning and end.  His readers are constantly negotiating their roles and the ways in which the text can be interpreted through its empty center.  Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler pleasures the reader both inside and outside the text (or so Roland Barthes might say); the text’s labyrinth tropes on the internal and external fluidity of information, creating a fluid methodology of reading.

Like Calvino’s novel, the “pattern/randomness” that dominates the computer interface and seeks to replace the “presence/absence” dualism, however, can prove problematic when thinking about the loss of actual material things (i.e. the environment). If we continue to think about the world through flows of informational patterns and relational ontologies, “a dynamism of randomness,” then we also have to be wary of the frightening disappearance of the material world by man—the epoch that has been termed the Anthropocene—and our roles in that disappearance.  I think one way to think about the poststructural/linguistic and ecological/material problems can also connect on a larger scale to the ways in which new materialists articulate concepts of networks of narrative agency. Moreover, Hayles argues that material-informational exchanges depict how “boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction”; therefore, thinking about embodiment within a material world becomes “paralleled and reinforced by a corresponding reinterpretation of the natural world” (3, 11).

Calvino, Italo. If on a winter’s night a traveler. Trans. WIlliam Weaver. New York: Harcourt                  Brace. Print. 1979.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Visual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature               and Informatics. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1999. Print.

Weiss, Beno. Understanding Italo Calvino. ColumHayles, N. Katherinebia: U of South                          Carolina P, 1993. Print.

David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin’s article “Remediation” delineates the notion that, increasingly, modes of mediation depict a multiplicity of forms while simulating a direct transmission of consciousness that yokes together ontological and technological perception. They suggest that the term “re-mediation” signifies this “double logic”: “Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying technologies of mediation” (2). Bolter and Grusin’s exploration of contemporary virtual reality renders how a flux of images construct both our “real” and “virtual” worlds while simultaneously noting the interchangeability of visualization and “big data.”

One example that fits into their framework of “remediation” is the virtual reality of Google Earth.  A network of cyber globes and maps, Google Earth reenacts the places and spaces of “real life”: our perception “moves” with the screen, and Google Earth imparts the illusion that the interface is indeed a place that translates the real world into the virtual world, and vice versa.

The film “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” highlights an interchangeability between virtual and actual worlds as conveyed by Google Earth. I’ve linked it here if anyone wants to watch it:

This film seems to interrogate the frightening chiasmus that haunts our current reality: the real world constructs the virtual world and the virtual world constructs the real world. Also, the ways in which the video transitions to convey a sense of hypermobility appropriates a multivalence that engages various sensory modes—aural and visual—while also blending cultural constructs. The film, thereby,  also relates aesthetic transportation to actual transportation through a visual interface: the computer interface itself–the visualization that we see–becomes transferable as an aesthetic form: yet, it is a performative form, relating and reenacting the “real” world.

Also, the temporal and spatial experiences of Google Earth are prominent: it distances the viewer from his or her current reality, transferring experience to another place; thus, the computer controls how we experience that place both in time and space. In addition, the sensation of movement that we experience also becomes a decentering, and subjective experience becomes vulnerable while we are also, paradoxically, enclosed within the safety of our own “technological device.” Therefore, the computer allows us, in a sense, to live within two worlds at once.

Finally, I want to think about the idea of “remediation,” too, through Bolter and Grusin’s final delineation of it as a “network”: “It would then be fair to say that the refashioning of a network of relationships is what defines a medium in our culture. Remediation in one dimension of media hybrids always seems both to suggest and to be suggested by remediations in other dimensions” (32). The metaphor of a network here implies not only a multiplicity of interchangeability and layering—a palimpsestic experience—but also constructs a nonlinear framework of information and knowledge.  The synthesis of surface and depth that exemplifies the symbolic realism of the interface structurally transforms representation.  Plus, the confluence of visual and  linguistic communications further emphasizes a fluctuating boundary between visual and semiotic representation.   Thereby, this further reinforces the historical connection between a person’s tools and his or her expansion of knowledge that might represent something like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of a “rhizome” which, perhaps, might look something like this:

If, indeed, remediation fosters the flexible movement of knowledge, then, it also underscores the ways in which associative thinking creates webs of knowledge. In his article “As We May Think” (1945), Dr. Vannevar Bush argues that men or women of science extend the powers of the mind through new sciences and technologies; he believes that science reinforces the need to develop relationships between the associative nature of our thinking and the sum of our knowledge.  After directing researchers and scientists to create weapons during the Second World War, Dr. Bush wrote this article to persuade scientists to make available their “bewildering storage of knowledge.” Bush uses the metaphor of what he calls a “memex” to develop the notion of the world’s first informational memory system: “a sort of mechanized private file and library” which “may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.”  http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/

Credited with the idea of the first “computer,” Bush confronts notions of technological determinism while correlating  the changing technologies of culture with the changing mores of humanity: therefore, Bush argues how we control the technology that we create.

Finally, to think about networked nodes of thinking and knowledge advocates for multimodal teaching praxis. The use of multimodal texts within the classroom simulates  real-world interactions with changing forms of knowledge while also fostering the creation of a  rhetorically-flexible mind–a mind that reads and synthesizes in various ways while also engaging in linguistic  code-switching. If our world composes forms of technology that are perpetually creating experiences of nonlinear information acquisition then it is important that our teaching methods reflect the cultural world that we live in–for ourselves and for our students.